Social media use continues to grow as established social media communities attract an ever wider membership and as new social media communities arise and are embraced by early adopters. As a result, a typical social media user may access multiple social media platforms, and may engage with multiple virtual communities of friends or contacts that only partially overlap between alternative platforms. Moreover, each platform and each virtual community provides its own stream of communications, such as news feeds, status updates, commentary, and the like, much of which may be substantively redundant between platforms. Consequently, the identification of information that is fresh, popular across one or more virtual communities, and of genuine interest to the social media user, can be a burdensome and sometimes frustrating undertaking, and may detract from the pleasure of social media participation.